


Subway Station

by marenubium87



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: AU, Angst, F/F, Pharmercy, Slice of Life, You Have Been Warned, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 10:28:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10695135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marenubium87/pseuds/marenubium87
Summary: Fareeha Amari spots an angel waiting for her train at the subway.This story does not have a happy ending.  Go no further if you're hoping for happy fluffy Pharmercy.  Hopefully it'll be in the next fic I write, but it sure as hell isn't in this one.Lena and Amélie make very, *very* small cameos.Rating is for one use of the "f" word.Technically written for the prompt "meeting place" on the Pharmercy subreddit, although I'm weeks late to the party.





	Subway Station

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a song (yes, *that* one, please feel free to murder me after you read) and "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace.

Fareeha Amari’s life was, all things considered, pretty great.

The career soldier had finally traded her combat boots for designer heels, her flak jacket for skirt suits, and now at the age of thirty-two, she was making more money than she’d ever dreamed of. Defense consulting was lucrative, and while the front lines of business were equally stressful, not being shot at was a step up.

There was something gentle and soothing about a daily routine that included hot showers, hot meals, and the abundant lack of taking cover in foxholes. Wake up, have breakfast, catch up on the news, feed Lena and Amélie (those two had a love-hate relationship, purring happily and snuggling together one day, and meowing threateningly at each other the next), shower, dress. She rode the subway to work; downtown parking was a level of hell even Dante had failed to envision.

If she was honest, the nine-to-five life was a bit more monotonous than she would have liked, but there was hardly any reason to complain every time she looked at her bank statements, her 401K. And she’d tell anyone who asked that it didn’t bother her that she came home to an empty house every night save for Lena and Amélie, or that the entire contents of her fridge consisted of two forlorn cartons of takeout from God-knows what epoch, and a half-empty pint of Ben and Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Cookie.

So yes, life was good.

She finished all of her work for the day half an hour early, which meant half an hour making an obscene amount of money whilst browsing Reddit. She swiped through new prospects on Tinder – a girl with a mop of brunette hair who looked like she had way too much energy, and a statuesque woman (seriously, who knew faces could be that well-proportioned) with a long ponytail scowling, as if the very act of having her picture taken was barely tolerable.

Fareeha sighed softly, not feeling enough of an urge to contact either of them, and then it was five. Time to go.

The journey from her office to the subway station a quarter-mile away was hardly stimulating, and she spent most of it in thought, being careful not to be knocked around in the river of humanity. There was a new Thai place she’d give a try tonight, and maybe she’d finally read a bit more out the computer game all of her office mates were talking about non-stop. It looked like a fairly typical shooter, except the characters all felt a bit too cartoony and out-of-place. Why the hell were a dwarf, a medieval knight, and a soldier with a jet pack all on the same team? Ridiculous.

The escalator finally dumped her into the bowels of the subway station. She fished in her back for her kindle - maybe she’d get a few pages in before her train. She looked up at the board to check the time

-and her eyes landed on the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.

The creature in question wore platinum blonde hair in a messy ponytail. She had her hands stuck in the pockets of her white coat, ID cards hanging limply from the ribbon looped around her neck. Bags under exhausted eyes, the faraway look of someone who had a world’s worth of troubles dumped into her lap, and Fareeha wondered what was on her mind. Maybe she’d just finished a long and grueling surgery. Maybe she’d just had to give some bad news to parents undeserving of such pain.

Maybe she’d just lost a patient.

There was a chime, and the electronic board flashed. A train was arriving at the station – not hers. She’d have to wait a couple minutes more.

The doctor got up, merging with the other passengers expectant with imminent boarding. The wisps of messy blonde hair that had been liberated from her messy ponytail caught the dull fluorescent lights of the station, transforming the light into the most beautiful golden glow that sat upon her head like an iridescent halo.

Fareeha would have sworn she was staring at an actual angel.

And as she stared, wide-eyed, slack-jawed at the impossibility of light and reality, the angel happened to glance in her direction. Smokey blue eyes met hers. Time ground to a halt. Fareeha forgot how to breathe.

Then the angel smiled at her.

It was a tired and soft smile, but the genuine kind that crinkled a little around the eyes. It was purity, compassion, the distilled perfection of everything that was right with the world. The rest of Fareeha’s reality, for one brief moment, vanished for lack of relevance.

Fareeha wondered if she gave that smile as she hovered over her patients, like their personal guardian angel. The smile, that made Fareeha’s knees weak, her heart pound, her mind overload. She wondered if there was someone so indescribably lucky to see that smile as the last thing before they went to bed, and the first thing when they woke up in the morning.

If that could somehow be bought, Fareeha would have emptied all of her bank accounts in an instant.

Instead she stood there, looking for all she knew like the world’s biggest idiot. Reality flushed into hyperfocus – the organic sounds of fifty conversations at once, none of them decipherable; the large stenciled sans-serif hypermodern font on the train proclaiming it belonged to the M line; the soft breeze of stale recirculated air against her skin.

For one brief moment, in the midst of this most unexpected place of the mundane, Fareeha experienced what actual life was meant to be, saturated with beauty, and happiness. And love.

Fareeha had never believed in love at first sight, and it only took this brief instant for her to realize that this belief that she’d held since time immemorial was thoroughly and unquestioningly wrong.

The train doors opened, disgorging its load of tired and overworked commuters, and ready to ingest more. The doctor turned away to board the train, and just like that, the moment was over. Fareeha blinked and shook her head. Reality, uninteresting and banal, settled back into existence.

The P train finally came, and Fareeha found a seat, working through another chapter of her novel. The rest of her commute was so uninteresting, and she was so lost in her thoughts, that she found herself at the door to her apartment, fumbling for her keys before she knew it. She called the Thai place and to her relief, she was in their delivery zone. There was nothing at home to cook anyway, and she wasn’t much in the mood to go back out for groceries.

Lena and Amélie were apparently back to being friends today, snuggled against each other. The Thai food came, and she made sure to give the delivery driver a generous tip. The food was amazing, although she became more and more aware of a dull pain in her chest afterward. She popped down a couple of Tums for the heartburn. Come to think of it though, her chest had been aching ever since she’d returned home. Probably just stress. She popped a couple of ibuprofin, just in case.

She did a little more research into the absurd shooter game, and grudgingly decided to buy it, just so she’d have something to talk about with her colleagues. It was so hard to take some of the cliches seriously. A sentient murderous robot with a pet bird? A cyborg ninja? But maybe it’d be more fun than it sounded.

She curled up on the couch, scrolling through Netflix for a show she could binge for the rest of the evening. She’d been looking forward to this all week; no work tomorrow, just a whole night of mindless entertainment.

But tonight she found nothing interesting enough to watch, or even try. Everything felt pathetically, cripplingly devoid of meaning. The apartment suddenly felt cold, lifeless, barren. The pain in her chest grew worse. She suddenly wanted to cry. It was inexplicable – she hadn’t cried in years, and most certainly not over a Friday night of binge-TV watching.

She decided to turn in early instead, choking back a sob as her head hit the pillow. The pain was gut-wrenching, the worst since she’d been in combat, but in a way, it was worse – the pain of regret, the feeling that she’d somehow made an enormous mistake on this mundane day in which no such mistakes had materialized.

She searched her memory, but it was as if the key to understanding this inexplicable emotional turmoil was just out of her grasp. Sure, she’d seen a really pretty doctor on the subway today, but it was folly to think that anything could have come of that. What was she supposed to do, walk up and say “Hi my names is Fareeha, I think you’re really pretty and I’d like to fuck you”? It wasn’t like relationships could just start by staring at a stranger in a public place. Life wasn’t a video game.

She’d seen pretty people before. To think that could have been the cause of this emotional distress was absurd. And yet, as her tears continued to soak into her pillow, she struggled for air against the feeling choking her. It was the feeling of having missed something so fundamentally obvious, to have found a person, or an idea, or a realization so beautiful and pure and life-changing for but a moment, and then having lost it in the featureless ocean of daily existence forever.

Fareeha Amari’s life was, all things considered, pretty great. And lying on her ridiculous high thread count king-sized mattress, wrapped in her expensive goose down sheets in the bedroom of her high-end apartment whose rent few could even afford, she tried to remind herself of that fact as she cried herself to sleep.


End file.
